Technical Abstract:
Micromalting procedures for malt quality analysis typically use 50 – 500 g of barley, and can produce malt with characteristics representative of those produced at a commercial scale. Modifications to routine micromalting protocols in which small quantities of grain within inexpensive mesh containers are surrounded by a larger quantity of grain in standard malting containers allow representative malts to be generated from 2 g of barley. The sample scale enables multiplexing samples within a malting container such that several different samples can be malted in the space formerly needed for a single sample, thereby increasing the potential malting throughput of existing micromalting equipment. The combination of this extremely small-scale malting procedure with previously described reduced-quantity mashing and malt analysis procedures greatly expands the capacity for preliminary screening of malt quality characteristics. This potentially benefits malting barley germplasm development programs by increasing sample throughput and reducing analysis turn-around time. In addition, the ability to generate and analyze representative malts on this very small scale may be useful in research studies where grain samples are limited, such as might occur in specially-developed genetic populations. This ability to malt extremely small amounts of barley will facilitate basic research studies examining the genetic and biochemical bases of malting quality